Anger Over Plan for Electronic Music in Staging Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Cycle

Robert Brubaker as Mime during Wagner’s “Siegfried” at the Met in 2009. He has backed out of the role for a Connecticut production of the opera after pressure over the use of digital music.

Beatriz Schiller / Metropolitan Opera

By MICHAEL COOPER

June 11, 2014

Nothing about Wagner’s epic “Ring” cycle is small in scale, but when a would-be impresario came up with the idea of staging it in West Hartford, Conn., he envisioned replacing its massive orchestral forces with the digital sounds of sampled instruments.

The idea of replacing musicians with machines in opera, a proudly acoustic art form that glories in its traditions, was seen as sacrilege by some music fans, players and union members, who took to social media to denounce the project and call for boycotts. That has been followed by what some singers in the cast viewed as strong-arm tactics: some received an email from musicians in the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra warning them that if they did not resign, “the live musicians of this country will remember you for the rest of your career and treat you as a traitor to our art form.”

The warning had an effect. “Coincident with my own concerns, my own artistic concerns, I have chosen to withdraw,” Robert Brubaker, the tenor who was to have sung Mime, a role in which he has won praise at the Metropolitan Opera, said in a telephone interview this week from Barcelona, Spain. “But,” he added, “I find it distressing to be threatened by other artists.”

The conflict has left some young singers in the cast, who are not yet stars like Mr. Brubaker and are just starting out in a tough environment for opera, anguished about whether to take advantage of a singing opportunity and risk the ire of colleagues, or to accept the argument that digital music is anathema to their profession and quit their hard-won jobs.

Lurking beneath the surface is a deep-seated fear among professional musicians for their livelihoods — a reflection of the disruption that the digital revolution has already wrought in the fields of publishing, journalism, advertising and recording. The issues raised by so-called virtual music led the musicians’ union to picket Broadway theaters more than a decade ago, bubbled up with dance companies that used recorded music instead of orchestras, and led a small Brooklyn opera company to cancel plans to use electronic music a decade ago after an outcry.

Staging a “Ring” cycle in Connecticut with a digital orchestra is the dream of Charles M. Goldstein, a musician and would-be impresario who was once an extra chorister at the Met, and who founded the Hartford Wagner Festival with the idea that one day Connecticut could become the only place outside of Bayreuth, Germany, to perform entire “Ring” cycles every year. He argued that there was no loss of jobs for musicians because, from the outset, he had never planned to use live players in the pit.

The high costs of putting on opera have challenged big and small companies alike in recent years. New York City Opera closed last year, the San Diego Opera had a near-death experience this year, and Connecticut lost its regional company, Connecticut Opera, in 2009. The Met is seeking to cut costs in contentious labor talks.

“Small companies just can’t really afford to hire 80, 90, 100 musicians in order to put on their productions, which is why so many small companies either use a piano, or a couple of pianos,” Mr. Goldstein said in an interview. He said that he had been experimenting with the idea of a digital orchestra since 1999. “I had the idea that small local companies, instead of using two pianos, could use some sort of digital sound to put on small productions,” he said.

After finding synthesizers unsatisfying, he bought access to something called the Vienna Symphonic Library, a collection of sampled sounds of orchestra instruments. Since 2005, he has been painstakingly entering every single note of the “Ring” into musical software. He has collaborated with his singers to choose tempos. When he puts on “Das Rheingold” this August, he said, he plans to set up 24 speakers to mimic the positions of instruments in the pit: speakers for the violins would face up, for example, while one for the French horn would face backward.

But the backlash has been fierce, and has rippled across the country from fans — and unions. Tino Gagliardi, the president of Local 802 of the American Federation of Musicians, in New York, likened it to operatic karaoke. “Are you kidding me?” he asked in an interview. “For some reason, they think an acceptable presentation of grand opera would not include the musicians.” Joseph Messina, the president of Local 400, in Connecticut, asked, “If you’re going to have a computerized orchestra, why don’t we just put robots in the seats?”

Some singers in the cast were rattled by the emails they started to receive, including the one signed by the “musicians of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra” that warned “participation with this monstrous concept of a digital orchestra is being communicated to every major opera orchestra musician in this country.”

The uproar pained the singers. Mr. Brubaker, the tenor who decided this week to withdraw, said that he had harbored reservations about the project from the beginning, but that he had signed on because he saw it as a chance to perform opera in a state that had lost a company, because he had been asked by an old college friend, and because of what he called the “spirit of exploration.” But he felt aggrieved by the tone of the email that went to the cast.

“I believe in freedom of expression,” he said. “I believe that artists who feel threatened can and should say what they feel. But to personally threaten other artists to withdraw from contracts, and withdraw from income — and for some of the younger artists, this may be a more serious issue — I don’t think this is correct.”

The letter from Chicago was written by Mark Brandfonbrener, a cellist in the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra, who said that his intention had not been to threaten anyone but to shame people into reconsidering their participation. He said that he may have overstated his authority, and that ultimately the letter should not be seen as speaking for the whole orchestra.

“I wrote the letter because I was incensed that someone would deface this work of art,” said Mr. Brandfonbrener, who has played in “Ring” cycles. “For me, it was like someone throwing a can of paint onto a work of art at a museum.”

Mr. Goldstein, the festival’s founder, had not seen the email that Mr. Brubaker sent asking to be released from his contract — breaking contracts is a major plot point in “Rheingold” — until a reporter asked him about it. But he said that no other singers had withdrawn.